Karlo.Org - Weblog

A week or two I finally broke down and purchased a Nike+ sensor for my second generation iPod Nano. For those of you not familiar with this product, it's basically a super-fancy pedometer you attach to your shoe that communicates with your iPod wirelessly via a small attachment plugged into the bottom of the iPod (it only works with the Nano.)

In terms of base execution, it's fantastic -- it absolutely performs as advertised, records distance and pace, and your iPod can even tell you during a run how far and fast you've gone. After you run, your data is automatically uploaded to the Nike+ website, which keeps track of your training and can even track your exercise pattern versus long-term goals.

The quality of the fundamental project, however, make's Nike's approach to the web site extremely fustrating. It's a totally closed system (you can't even get an RSS feed of your run data, nor can anyone make a screen-scraper because it's entirely done in flash) and it's totally lacking in what we'd expect from any "Web 2.0" era site (think Flickr, Youtube, etc.) There are some community features, but they're weak and ad-hoc, allowing you to manually create "challenges" and add users to them. Why can't I simply connect with other people I know who are using this, and stay connected, a-la Flickr or MySpace? Or why can't Nike at least provide enough of an API (like Flickr, Amazon, or any other of a million of immensely popular sites) so that the legions of programmers out there can think up even better things, that will drive sales, etc.? Surely Apple understands this dynamic, so I can only assume that this traces back to Nike having a relatively old-school (Web "1.0") attitude around marketing, and around allowing end customers to use their data as they please and leverage relationships online.

That said, anyone out there using this, and want to join a friendly challenge group? Let me know.

(BTW, I'm not using the Nike+ shoes; I purchased the Marware Sensor+, which lets me use the system with my regular running shoes. It doesn't seem to affect accuracy to any material degree.)

Posted by Tom at 6:59 PM | Permalink

By now you've noticed I'm posting links using del.iico.us. Unfortunately, there isn't a lot of control over the format of the posts, but the system in general works great -- I file bookmarks with meta data (far better than the regular bookmark menu), have them available (and searchable) from any web browser, and can share what I'm bookmarking via a daily feed to this weblog.

It's not a robust as full narrative posts, but these links do cover a lot of things I think are worthwhile, but might not qualify for the effort of a post. I think it's a pretty good compromise, but we'll see how it works out long-term.

Posted by Tom at 11:26 PM | Permalink

My uncle Joel has a great new weblog, MarketManila which covers cooking, food and restaraunt business. Definitely worth adding to your list.

Posted by Tom at 10:11 PM | Permalink

I've written about RSS (news feed) aggregators in the past, but over the past 6 months it really has taken off and almost any site you'd want to keep up with is now available via an RSS feed.

So you can stop "checking" to see if a site you like that's only updated occasionally has been updated, and start using an RSS aggregation service like NewsGator to manage almost all of your web reading. I have about 80 sites that I track via NewsGator and it's a great way to keep up on friends who have weblogs, as well as photographers with RSS-enabled photoblogs (or even just Flickr pages, since that's RSS-enabled.)

I've included an abridged version of the current list of web sites I have linked into my (free) NewsGator online account, so you can see how powerful this can be. I'm able to read updates from all of them -- and keep track of exactly which I've read -- all from a single interface.

Continue reading "NewsGator -- Control Your Surfing" »

Posted by Tom at 10:21 PM | Permalink

Since I'm leaving school in a couple of weeks, it seemed like an important time to update my much-neglected address book before I lose touch with friends from school. Having seen a few friends using it, I tried out Plaxo, a plug-in to Outlook that provides a terrific service -- helping you maintain your contact list and automatically transmit updates of contact information between you and your friends.

I had my doubts, but a week later 90% of the 150 or so folks I sent Plaxo update requests to have updated their contact information in my address book, with almost no manual intervention from me at all. Better yet, Plaxo is an "old-school" dot-com trying to get to a certain network size and then profit off providing the service to corporations. So there's no advertising. (I wouldn't have used it if it had any advertising or spyware involved.) Way to take the high road, Plaxo.

It's about time that the old-fashioned address book moved into the networked age. There's no reason we should still be manually communicating our contact info to the people we want to stay in touch with.

Follow-Up: Plaxo is not without its detractors. Still, I stand by my assessment. Much like Google, they seem to have understood the idea of "don't be evil."

Posted by at 1:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

TypeKey, from Six Apart, the makers of Moveable Type, is an idea that's long overdue. They haven't released it, but in smartly pre-announcing it they've probably kept anyone else from bringing such a concept to market.

TypeKey is a free, open system providing a central identity that anyone can use to log in and post comments on blogs and other web sites.

Comment registration on weblogs has always been a problem. Authors don't want to require in-depth registration because it dampers conversation by discouraging new voices. Users already feel like they have too many accounts to keep track of. And because you can only kick someone after the damage is done, registration rarely discourages spammers.

A centralized registration system, from a "benign" corporate entity like this one, however, solves many of those problems. Users only need to register once. Weblogs don't have to expend effort developing and maintaining a registration system and user base.

Continue reading "TypeKey" »

Posted by at 10:03 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (4)

This site is the latest incarnation of a personal information site I've maintained for a decade, first as the "home page" concept of the mid-90's and starting in 2001 as a web log. Since almost the beginning, it's been supported either by my own software or custom system setup.

After almost four years of hosting my web server off my own hardware, I'm trying out using TypePad, a web hosting service based around the Moveable Type publishing system (MT). So far, it seems like a good pick to stay with -- I just don't think it's a good use of time any more to act as a system administrator for a small web site when good, hosted alternatives exist.

Continue reading "Trying out TypePad" »

Posted by at 9:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Given that it's Easter week (and Tax Day, too), I'm going to jump in early with a non-New York, non-intellectual post pandering to your secret interest in all things cute and fuzzy. Go see Oolong - The pancake rabbit if you haven't. Send it to your friends as an Easter link. Win fame and fortune. (Note: if you are interested in protecting your hardass trader/cop/librarian/fashion-critic image, maybe send this only to non-work friends.)

Posted by at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

Fast Company has a great article on the culture at everyon's favorite search engine. "How Google Grows...and Grows...and Grows"

One reason Google puts its innovations on public display is to identify failures quickly. Another reason is to find winners. For Bharat and Mayer, those 70,000 users provided ammunition to build a case for News within Google. "A public trial helps you go fast," Mayer says. "If it works, it builds internal passion and fervor. It gets people thinking about the problem."

Posted by at 3:04 PM | Permalink

As a result of the war, I've been looking at a much wider variety of news web sites than usual. Far and away, the most innovative page design I've seen is at the International Herald Tribune's web site. Check out this article: "IHT: U.S. takes on elite guard"... in particular, they've successfully incorporated a multi-column format into a single page, avoided the need for scrolling (a relatively difficult and imprecise interaction in window interfaces) and yet allows users to change to other traditional layouts if they desire. Try the buttons at the lower right of the screen. Also, the page structure, design and advertising are incorporated really well into an integrated package. I wish the New York Times (which own the IHT) had this nice a page design.

Posted by at 11:51 PM | Permalink

Here's a random one, but worth reading if you dislike the amazing amount of pseudo-science floating around in the media. Bad Astronomy is an extensive site that works to debunk many concepts about the heavens based on poor (or non-existent) science. This include people who think the moon landings were faked and the poor science often seen in Hollywood movies.

Posted by at 2:59 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (2)

The Onion's lead headline today: "Bush Sends Troops to West Nile".

WASHINGTON, DC --Vowing to "exact justice for the taking of innocent American lives," a determined and defiant President Bush deployed more than 14,000 ground troops to the West Nile Monday.

Let's just hope the Bejing Daily News doesn't get a hold of this one.

Posted by at 11:12 AM | Permalink

It's not often you see anything innovative in mapping... but MapBlast's new LineDrive mapping system for driving directions is really a leap forward in printable maps for navigation. Rather than simply highlighting the route on a map, the system seems to actually create a vector diagram of the route, showing the turns and relative directions but (critically) removing the scale of the distance of each leg, as well as any turns in the road itself. By omitting this useless information (distance is provided in numeric terms, which is what you would convert the map leg to anyway in viewing it) the diagram is far easier to read, and even easier to memorize if you're the driver. Edward Tufte would be proud.

Posted by at 4:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

One thing I miss in the MP3-era is the old practice of discovering new music by listening to the radio. Even if you still listen to FM on a regular basis, it's rare you'll hear them play much that's not already on the top-40, given their emphasis on widely-palatable, predictable playlists (low-power college stations are an exception to this rule, but hard to tune into and often erratic in quality.)

Today, I've been trying out Streamer, a new (and I mean alpha, watch-your-fingers new) peer-to-peer Internet radio system. It allows users, even those with very limited bandwidth available, to create largely anonymous online radio stations that can broadcast to a theoretically unlimited number of end users, by having the other listeners also act like "repeaters" -- to borrow some VHF/UHF parlance.

Aside from a tiny (~100K) download, the system mostly uses the MP3 player you already have, probably WinAmp, and builds on existing standards for Internet broadcasting, primarily the free Shoutcast server from Nullsoft and/or the freely-available, open-source IceCast server.

Give it a try, and be patient - getting a connection to a new station can take a minute or two, and at first I didn't even get a listing of available stations. It's a nifty system, especially if you're a music junky and would like to consider re-transmitting your music tastes to the world.

Posted by at 1:44 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (2)

KFG points out SkyscraperPage.com... checking out the diagram for New York's tallest buildings is a learning experience, and the Shanghai diagram makes my pictures from April in Shanghai all the more interesting.

Posted by at 12:03 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (3)

Odd... using trackback, you can create loops. [Karlo.Org -- Tom Karlo] :: Trackback and MT 2.2

Just my silly way of testing that things are working. Of course, I've realized now that it's really heard to get to the individual entries on this site (at least until they age some.) Going to have to fix that soon.

Posted by at 11:14 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (3)

Merlin D. Mann (Ever wonder what his real name is?) of KungFuGrippe is working on VerisignOff.com, a site that teaches people how they can switch their domain registrations away from Verisign, and over to other registrars where they'll get better service and lower prices.

Myself, I've switched all the domains I care about to Dotster. So far, service has been great, and I've been paying one third of what Verisign charged me annually. I'll be sending step-by-step instructions on switching to Dotster (it's easy) to Merlin for inclusion in his site.

Posted by at 9:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

If I end up with any more RSS-subscribed content on this site, I'm going to get to the point where I don't actually have to write anything anymore. I've switched the right-hand column list of "other reading" over to a customized feed from Blogrolling.Com. Sure, all of the content there is mine (unlike the Blogdex section above it, where all of the content is, well, everyone's.)

The list of top blogs right now on Blogrolling is a little depressing. I like Lockergnome-writer Chris Pirillo as much as anyone, but I'm not sure I'm thrilled that he's the biggest common link between the cultural context of 900-odd bloggers participating in that system. Running down the top 5-10 from there isn't much of a thrill either.

Continue reading "RSS Blogroll" »

Posted by at 7:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

If I end up with any more RSS-subscribed content on this site, I'm going to get to the point where I don't actually have to write anything anymore. I've switched the right-hand column list of "other reading" over to a customized feed from Blogrolling.Com. Sure, all of the content there is mine (unlike the Blogdex section above it, where all of the content is, well, everyone's.)

The list of top blogs right now on Blogrolling is a little depressing. I like Lockergnome-writer Chris Pirillo as much as anyone, but I'm not sure I'm thrilled that he's the biggest common link between the cultural context of 900-odd bloggers participating in that system. Running down the top 5-10 from there isn't much of a thrill either.

Continue reading "RSS Blogroll" »

Posted by at 7:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The rise of NYC Bloggers, a web site that lists New York weblogs graphically by the subway stop they're nearest to, also illustrates one of the primary weaknesses of the blogging community: vanity. Despite the fact it's not very interesting to the 99.99% of the world not writing web logs, the site is now the number one linked item on weblogs tracked by MIT's Blogdex index of weblog news activity.

This isn't suprising, but it's revealing. Imagine if whenever the Pulitzers were announced, it was the A-1 story in your newspaper. You'd think they were pretty silly. (As it is, I think it's pretty silly when they get the front page at all, unless it's a really slow news day. Hardly anyone outside the news or publishing industry is affected by them.) Weblogs need to keep in mind that their readers may not be as interested in web-logging "the practice" as in the actual content of their web logs. Otherwise, they could go read a weblog about weblogging.

(Notice how I have managed to link to this site, while at the same time criticizing others who linked to it? Learned that one in journalism school.)

Posted by at 8:15 AM | Permalink

Just finished adding integration with Google's API for web developers, thanks to some nifty code from Rael. Similar to the referrer list and RSS/XML syndicated "guest blog", I'm using a timed background script to update that data, since it doesn't change very fast.

I still can't get Rael's Amazon API code to work... as usual, it requires perl modules that I don't have, and can't get to install properly yet.

Posted by at 7:48 AM | Permalink

You can find the funniest things in your site log... including this link to an Arabic Translation of this site. Just for kicks, I also link to the dollarshort.org translation.

In case you don't have Arabic language support, here's an image of yesterday's post in Arabic.

Posted by at 7:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I've added a little hack onto the list of links beneath each post on this site: the "Google!" link will take you to a Google search of vaguely related items (depending on how well I composed the query for that entry.) Even if I didn't compose a specific query, it will attempt one based on the title of the post (as is the case with this one.)

It's not an original concept, but since it's neat and my particular implementation might be useful to other PHP/MT users, here's the relevant code:

| <a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=<? if("<MTEntryExcerpt
encode_php="qq">") {
echo urlencode("<MTEntryExcerpt encode_php="qq">") ;
} else {
echo urlencode("<MTEntryTitle encode_php="qq">");
}; ?>">Google!</a>

Posted by at 3:30 PM | Permalink

Usually, unsolicited emails telling me to go to a web site are best ignored, but I was lucky to check out digicam views based on a polite email from the author (who I guess came here looking for The Pixel Foundry, my old site.) Although I'm still not totally happy with the picture quality of my Canon S100 (purchased a year and a half ago), especially in an unfair comparison to my prosumer Nikon N90S 35mm film camera, it's evident that digital photography is well on the way to supplanting film for everyday snaps.

Posted by at 9:04 AM | Permalink

Hot dang... finally got Moveable Type 2.0 installed and working, just days after setting up the new server. I guess waiting for the new machine was the right choice -- setting up MT on Mandrake 8.2 was a ton easier than on the older versions of this distribution.

Now all I have to do is actually make a new template, one that's compatible with MoveableType. I think it will be better to rework the generic one into a new style, rather than trying to mangle my old template into this system. We'll have to see....

Posted by at 10:01 PM | Permalink

Hot dang... finally got Moveable Type 2.0 installed and working, just days after setting up the new server. I guess waiting for the new machine was the right choice -- setting up MT on Mandrake 8.2 was a ton easier than on the older versions of this distribution.

Now all I have to do is actually make a new template, one that's compatible with MoveableType. I think it will be better to rework the generic one into a new style, rather than trying to mangle my old template into this system. We'll have to see....

Posted by at 10:01 PM | Permalink

For the moment, it's hard to tell, but I've moved Karlo.Org from our trusty Pentium 2 / 300 web server to a new Celeron 850 machine, custom built as a small form factor server! Right now I'm only using it for web serving, but once everything seems okay, I'll switch over mail service as well and decommision the old machine ("jeeves") and everything will depend on this one ("cube").

To get an idea of how small the new server is physically, it's sitting on top of a standard stereo receiver in the photo at left. The front face is only a little larger than a CD case.

Posted by at 9:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Good Press Google.com deserves applause for deciding to publicize requests for censorship on it search site based on the DMCA. It's turned out that several of the highest profile requests have been from the Church of Scientology against Xenu.net, an investigative (and vocally anti-COS) site that publishes extensive Church of Scientology documents and history plus analysis and investigation of the Church of Scientology. Of course, because of the Google disclosure of the DMCA requests, that site has now gotten attention far beyond what it ever would have earned from its search listings on Google. And with thousands of sites linking (like I just did) to Xenu.net in articles, it's now going to be only one click away from many of the top Google results for Church of Scientology, anyway. I think I like Google more every day.

Note that although Google removed links directly to allegedly copyrighted documents, they retained their links to Xenu.net. With all these articles, it's going to getting closer to topping out the COS's own home page in the Google results.

Posted by at 1:38 PM | Permalink